Ho trovato questa bellissima recensione di Stephen Holden sul New York Times, che descrive benissimo la scena di "I Want You" della quale parlavo io, e che come dicevo mi sembra molto indicativa di come il film non banalizzi affatto il materiale dei Beatles. La cito solo perché lo trovo un ottimo pezzo, più vicino all'analisi che ad una recensione:
One of the most surreal moments in “Across the Universe,”Julie Taymor’s passionate ’60s fantasia set to the songs of the Beatles, is a three-and-a-half-minute sequence at an Army induction center in New York City. Here is where Max Carrigan (Joe Anderson), a spirited hippie rebel from an upper-middle-class family, reluctantly reports for his physical examination after receiving his draft notice. Because he was told that if he swallowed cotton balls they would show up on an X-ray as spots on his lungs, he quickly ingests one as he enters the building.
No sooner has Max arrived than an Uncle Sam recruiting poster stirs to life, and the eagle-eyed glare of the white-haired geezer in his top hat and parade outfit fixes on him. Growling the opening phrases of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” Uncle Sam reaches out a giant animated hand and grabs Max by the shoulder.
Simultaneously two uniformed soldiers clamp their hands on him from behind and roughly push him into a narrow corridor, lined on both sides with uniformed soldiers standing at ramrod attention, wearing prosthetic makeup that turns their faces into identical wooden masks. With their grim, expressionless features and jutting chins, they suggest a nightmarish corps of slit-eyed fascist troopers gazing ahead with a blank malevolence.
As Max moves down the line, their arms robotically reach out and snatch away his shirt and trousers, leaving him in his briefs. Attempting to elude their grasp, he executes a somersault that lands him in a row of nervous fellow recruits, also stripped to their briefs. The half-naked men face a grim herd of soldiers executing a mechanical calisthenicslike war dance that is all right angles, to a grinding metallic soundtrack punctuated with stomping cha-cha-chas.
“I want you so bad, it’s driving me mad,” voices shout on the soundtrack. Suddenly the ceiling, a grid of inverted boxes, lowers to the floor, trapping the recruits in rows of identical cubicles, each with a desk, a lamp and an interrogating officer. Lids crash down from above.
In a quick cutaway, stenciled crates of ammunition double as cramped examination rooms in which the recruits are processed like pieces of meat. A doctor, unseen except for a glimpse of his gloved hand, examines miscellaneous body parts: an arm, a leg, feet, teeth and gums, and an eye stretched wide open in a frightening image reminiscent of “A Clockwork Orange.” Urine streams into measuring glasses. Then, abruptly, the doors of the examining rooms are slammed shut.
In another quick cut the recruits are grabbed from behind by the officers and forced to fall into push-ups as the soldiers step over them without looking down. The humiliation of young men, still clad only in briefs, suggests a ritualized gang rape, after which the victims are yanked to their feet and forced to dance briefly with their abusers, then thrown onto the floor on their backs. Before they have time to stir, they begin to slide involuntarily across the room, their hands shielding their eyes.
They emerge in a miniature jungle to the sound of helicopters as the second half of the song begins. The camera pulls back from a close-up of their boots slogging through the mud, to reveal them still half-naked, lugging a giant model of the Statue of Liberty through the steaming forest. As they lumber forward at the laborious pace of a graduation march, the words “She’s so heavy,” sung on the soundtrack, suggest the collective groan of a chain gang.
Max is next seen plunking a tiny Statue of Liberty on the desk of a decorated officer.
“Any reason you shouldn’t be in this man’s Army, son?” he demands.
Max blurts out, “I’m a cross-dressing homosexual pacifist with a spot on my lung.”
Acting as though he hasn’t heard, the officer announces, “Long as you don’t have flat feet,” and stamps Max’s papers. The next moment Max is shown shrink-wrapped from head to toe and labeled 1A. He’s officially in the Army.
The sequence, like everything else in the movie, is charged with emotion, in this case fear. Other scenes use masks and puppetry, music and surreal choreography to evoke ecstasy, fury and sheer strangeness.
Anyone who experienced firsthand the tumult of the counterculture should recognize the volatile mixture of idealism and rage that runs through the movie and through Beatles songs like “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” which is used so ingeniously that it sounds as though it had been written for the induction scene.
Despite all their whimsy and cheek, the Beatles’ songs were rarely cynical. “Across the Universe” understands that behind the era’s experimentation with drugs and sex and political confrontation lay a fundamental innocence, a belief that somehow it would all lead toward a more enlightened world. The movie’s power lies in its refusal to offer a skeptical, revisionist take on the period. Its view of the counterculture is unabashedly romantic: Those were the good old days, fondly remembered, never to be recovered.
